…. any more than Scotland is the UK. It’s part of it, with similar customs and cultures, but that’s it. There is far more to China than Hong Kong.

“How do you say ‘Happy New Year again in Chinese?’”, I heard someone say last week. After mimicking a supposedly Chinese accent, someone replied, “Kung hei fat choy”.

I could feel my blood start to simmer. ‘No, that’s Cantonese. It’s xin nian kuai le which the billion mainlanders say,’ I said to myself. I wasn’t in the mood to play the ex-China expat card. Hey, it’s good enough, isn’t it, that someone knew how to say it in at least one of the languages and dialects that make up the People’s Republic of China and its Special Administrative Regions, of which Hong Kong is one?

Not really. It feels to me that the average educated Chinese person knows far more about the UK than the average educated British person does about China. This was borne out by the number of times I was challenged on the definitions of Great Britain and the UK while living in China. “Scotland isn’t a country though,” a colleague would always argue when I tried to explain how our “nations” were united. “It’s complicated,” I said. “A bit like you and Taiwan”.

It doesn’t help that the cultural references beamed into people’s living rooms come via American or Australian-born Chinese chefs plying food of southern Chinese or vaguely southeast Asian descent. It feels to me that they have watered down the cuisine the mainland offers to completely unauthentic stir fries with lemon grass and coconut.

When will people get taught about the potato and aubergine dishes from north-east China, the beautifully spicy food from Sichuan and the lamb kebab and noodle dishes of the north-west? That’s just for starters. When will people stop thinking Chinese food is sweet and sour gloop? I wasn’t served a prawn cracker once on the Chinese mainland.

Of course, there are people in the UK who are extremely well informed, but by and large the ignorance frustrates me.

With Hong Kong being a former British colony, it’s unsurprising that its culture has become an entry point for people to understand the vast republic, but I hope that as China plays a bigger part in the UK’s economy, people learn it’s only a fraction of the full story.